PREFACE.

Jacques, the founder of the convent of Beit-Abe, and of the Oriental ascetics. Above all, the funeral oration he pronounced upon the death of Mar Jacques was praised. "This oration," says Thomas of Marga, "bears witness to the elevation of his intelligence and the power of his word; he would have been a writer of genius original: "ܕܰܠܝܺܬ݂ܳܐ ܐܶܬ݂ܒ݁ܰܩܺܝ ܪܽܘܚܳܐ ܕ݁ܡܶܠܬ݂ܶܗ." (Book of Governors, 54) if, in the end, he had not gone astray and exited the Church." Let us add to the list of his works the five letters which, in the manuscript we are publishing, follow the treatise, his principal work.

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Reading Sahdona's treatise erases the bad impression left by the accounts of Thomas and Ichodnah, and especially the letters of Ichoyab. Ichoyab was certainly excusable and in good faith in his attacks against Sahdona, whose conversion appeared to him as a felony and a betrayal of the religious interests entrusted to him. xOne understands that he attributed the conversion of his friend to boundless ambition. But Sahdona, in his treatise, shows himself to be a convinced believer, penetrated by the grandeur of his task. He practiced the monastic life with ardor, says Thomas of Marga: "Sahdona subjected himself sufficiently to the practices of the religious life through abstinence, fasting, vigils, and prayer under the direction of Rabban our master/monk (Mar Jacques). One knows that he also experienced the sweetness of the purity of morals that a convinced soul tastes, to judge by the thoughts he expressed in his treatise on xthe chaste life of the ascetic." (Liber Superiorum Book of Superiors, p. 53).

The manuscript that we have edited is unique; it comes from Mount Sinai and belongs to the library of